I recently read a book that had been circulating in my face book feed called ‘Where Did You Go?’ ‘’Out’ ‘What Did You Do?’ ‘Nothing.’
At first I thought it was going to be a self help for finding balance and a chance to minimize and simplify a life, but it when it came in from the library it was labeled a ‘memoir’ in the vein of Mark Twain.
A disappointment in the self-help part, but still, oh my yes! I wanted to read this!
Most of the book seemed to be comparing the author’s childhood with modern children, and how different they are. Let me summarize what Robert Paul Smith has to say about modern children vs. his own youth.
He complains about school conferences- that school is school and home is home and teachers and parents ought not be expected to do each other’s jobs. He complains about what is commonly called ‘helicopter parents’ (he never uses the term himself), the people who follow their kids around and fight their battles and protect them from everything. He says we are teaching our children too early- that learning ought to wait while kids get to be kids. He says that modern kids spend too much time on their gadgets and not enough time playing and inventing their own games. He also says they waste too much.
Smith says that kids get too much assurance that they are doing well, and get pleasant smiles from parents when they used to get discipline. Sex and scantily clad women are now everywhere. And he says, “these kids are getting into so much trouble with the cops because the cops are the first people they meet who say and mean it ‘you can’t do that’.
When he was a kid, kids had ‘nothing to do’, unlike today, where adults keep kids on a frenetic schedule to keep themselves and their kids too busy to do nothing. Which was exactly my problem that I went to this book for!
There is no more distinction between the good and the bad, the respectable and the disrespectable. And when he was a kid, America was GOOD. Smith assumes that this is because modern grownups are so childish that there is no room for a kid to have a secret life, or even a separate one.
Not all is horrible, though. He thinks the modern idea of not always resorting to violence is a good one.
So now, I can only assume that you are nodding along and agreeing with him. Yes, let’s go back to the way things were when we were kids!
Hang on a sec. Let me show you the copyright date. He was 46 when he wrote this book, and the copyright is 1957, so….
He’s talking about a childhood in WWI and the turmoil beyond.
The more things change, huh? The ‘kids today’ he’s ranting about are the baby boomers.